The Real Reason Your Meetings Are Terrible (And Why Everyone's Too Polite to Tell You)

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Three months ago, I sat through a two-hour "strategy alignment session" where seventeen people discussed whether our quarterly check-ins should be monthly or bi-weekly. By the end, we'd scheduled another meeting to decide when to schedule the meeting about scheduling meetings.

That's when it hit me like a cricket bat to the head: we're not having meetings anymore. We're having therapy sessions disguised as business discussions, and nobody wants to be the one to say the emperor's got no bloody clothes on.

After seventeen years of sitting in boardrooms from Melbourne to Perth, watching executives nod seriously while discussing "synergistic opportunities" and "leveraging our core competencies," I've cracked the code. Your meetings aren't terrible because of poor planning or lack of agenda. They're terrible because you've forgotten what meetings are actually for.

The Great Australian Meeting Delusion

Here's what nobody wants to admit: 73% of Australian business meetings could be replaced by a three-sentence email and everyone would be happier. But we keep having them because somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that collaboration means sitting in rooms together looking busy.

I blame the Americans for this one. All those Silicon Valley "innovation workshops" and "ideation sessions" filtered down here, and suddenly every conversation needs to happen in a conference room with whiteboards and sticky notes. We took the worst parts of corporate culture and wrapped them in our laid-back Aussie approach, creating this bizarre hybrid where people say "no worries" while secretly wanting to strangle each other with ethernet cables.

The real kicker? Most of the people in your meetings don't want to be there either. They're checking emails, planning their weekend, or wondering if they remembered to put the bins out. But Australian politeness means nobody's going to stand up and say, "This is a complete waste of everyone's time."

Except me. I'm saying it.

What Actually Makes Meetings Work (Spoiler: It's Not Team Building)

Last year, I worked with a construction company in Brisbane where the site manager ran the most efficient meetings I've ever witnessed. Fifteen minutes, maximum. Everyone stood up. No laptops, no phones, no bloody PowerPoint presentations about "engagement metrics."

"Right, what's broken, what's behind schedule, who needs help?" Done.

Compare that to the three-hour "quarterly review" I endured at a marketing agency where we spent forty-five minutes discussing the font choice for internal memos. Internal. Memos. That three people would ever read.

The construction guys got it right because they understood something most white-collar workers have forgotten: meetings are for solving problems and making decisions. Everything else is just expensive socialising.

But here's where it gets interesting. The best meetings I've ever been part of had one thing in common: someone was genuinely worried about something important. Not worried about looking busy or demonstrating their value to the organisation. Actually concerned about a real problem that needed fixing.

When people are genuinely invested in an outcome, meetings become focused. Sharp. Productive.

When they're just going through the motions? That's when you get hour-long discussions about whether the new coffee machine should go in the kitchen or the break room.

The Status Meeting Epidemic

Speaking of going through the motions, can we talk about status meetings for a minute? You know the ones. Where Sarah from accounting reads through her to-do list while everyone else zones out and thinks about lunch.

Status meetings are where productivity goes to die.

I once calculated that a weekly team status meeting at a mid-sized consulting firm was costing them roughly $127,000 per year in lost productivity. That's assuming people were only half-mentally present, which was generous. Most of them looked like they were contemplating the meaning of existence or planning their escape route.

The tragic part? All that "status" information could be shared in a simple project management tool or a five-minute standup. But someone, somewhere, decided that "communication is key" meant "let's schedule more meetings to talk about things we could just write down."

The Meeting Room Arms Race

Then there's the whole meeting room situation. Companies spend ridiculous amounts on fancy conference rooms with smart boards and video conferencing setups that nobody knows how to use properly. I've watched grown professionals spend twenty minutes trying to figure out why the screen isn't mirroring while seventeen people sit there pretending this is normal.

Meanwhile, the most productive conversations happen in hallways, at coffee machines, or during those accidental encounters in the car park. Real talk happens when people aren't performing for an audience or following an agenda someone else wrote.

But try suggesting your next "strategic planning session" should happen over beers at the local pub, and watch everyone suddenly remember their compliance training about appropriate workplace behaviour.

The irony is killing me.

What I Got Wrong About Meeting Facilitation

For years, I thought the solution was better meeting facilitation training. Teach people how to run meetings properly, create better agendas, establish ground rules. Classic consultant thinking: if something's broken, add more process.

Turns out I was completely wrong.

The problem isn't that people don't know how to run meetings. The problem is that most meetings shouldn't exist in the first place. You can't facilitate your way out of a fundamentally unnecessary gathering. It's like trying to improve the efficiency of a chocolate teapot.

The best meeting facilitators I know spend most of their time talking clients out of having meetings. "Could this be an email? Could this be a quick phone call? Could this wait until someone actually has a decision to make?"

Revolutionary stuff, I know.

The Remote Work Reality Check

COVID did us one massive favour: it exposed how many of our meetings were pure theatre. When we couldn't gather in conference rooms and gesture at whiteboards, suddenly everyone discovered the magical efficiency of asynchronous communication.

People started making decisions via Slack. Projects moved forward through shared documents. Problems got solved in quick video calls with only the people who actually needed to be involved.

It was beautiful.

Then we went back to the office and immediately resumed scheduling hour-long meetings to discuss things that used to take five minutes on Zoom. Because apparently, nothing says "professional workplace culture" like gathering eight people to watch one person read from a document they could have just emailed.

I'm not saying remote work is perfect. But it definitely highlighted how much time we waste on performative collaboration.

The Psychology Behind Meeting Addiction

Here's the uncomfortable truth: some people love bad meetings. They provide structure, social interaction, and the illusion of importance. For managers who struggle with delegation or trust, meetings offer the perfect opportunity to stay involved in everything without actually contributing much.

It's management theater. Look busy, ask questions that sound insightful, nod thoughtfully while someone else does the actual thinking. Meanwhile, the people who could be solving problems are sitting there wondering why their expertise isn't trusted enough to just let them get on with it.

I've seen senior executives schedule meetings just to feel like they're earning their salary. "I had six meetings today" becomes a badge of honour instead of a sign that something's seriously wrong with how work gets done.

The worst part? These meeting-heavy managers often complain about not having enough time for "real work." Well, mate, maybe stop scheduling so many bloody meetings.

Australian Companies Getting It Right

Not everyone's stuck in meeting hell. Some Australian businesses have figured out how to collaborate without turning every conversation into a formal gathering.

Atlassian, for instance, has some brilliant approaches to reducing meeting overhead. They've embraced asynchronous communication tools and actually trust their teams to make decisions without constant check-ins. Revolutionary.

Canva's approach to team communication training focuses on clarity over frequency. They'd rather have one meaningful conversation than five status updates that nobody remembers.

These companies understand that good communication isn't about having more meetings. It's about having better conversations when you actually need them.

The Meeting Detox Method

So how do you fix this mess? Start with a meeting detox. Cancel everything for a week. I'm serious. Every standing meeting, every recurring check-in, every "quick sync" that's been running for months without anyone remembering why it started.

See what actually breaks.

Spoiler alert: most things will be fine. The few genuine issues that arise? Those are the conversations worth scheduling time for.

Then, when you do start having meetings again, apply the "kidney test." If removing this meeting would cause the same level of disruption as removing someone's kidney, keep it. Everything else is probably just habit dressed up as necessity.

The Five-Minute Rule

Here's my personal favourite: every meeting proposal has to include a five-minute version. If you can't explain why this conversation couldn't happen in five minutes or less, you probably don't understand the problem well enough to be calling a meeting about it.

Most "urgent strategy sessions" suddenly become very manageable when you force yourself to articulate what actually needs deciding. Funny how that works.

Why Nobody Talks About This Stuff

The meeting industrial complex has some powerful defenders. Training companies that sell facilitation workshops. Consultants who bill by the hour for process improvement. Software vendors pushing collaboration platforms that require, conveniently, more meetings to be effective.

But mostly, we don't talk about meeting addiction because it requires admitting that a lot of what we consider "professional behaviour" is actually just expensive procrastination.

That's a hard pill to swallow when you've built your career on looking busy rather than being productive.

The Bottom Line

Your meetings are terrible because they're solving the wrong problem. Instead of figuring out how to communicate better, you're trying to schedule communication into submission. Instead of trusting people to make decisions, you're creating committees to avoid responsibility.

The solution isn't better meetings. It's fewer meetings, with clearer purposes, involving only people who can actually influence the outcome.

Everything else is just expensive small talk with added PowerPoint slides.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go decline three meeting invitations and get some actual work done.